Down the Hanford Reach

[Jan Klimkowski]

"You do not own this land, our Mother Earth," Smohalla told Homily. "It is not your land to barter to the white people like a piece of salmon."

More on Smohalla here:

Smohalla
(c. 1815-95)

Wanapam shaman and prophet

Born in a Wanapam village near present-day Walla Walla, Washington, Smohalla came to speak for a large contingent of Plateau Indians who faced dispossession during the nineteenth century. In the process, he created an ideology that continues to influence Plateau affairs to this day.

We know almost nothing of Smohalla's childhood and early career. Some claim that his given name was Wak-wei (Arising from the Dust of the Earth Mother), though some called him Waip-shwa (Rock Carrier). Physically distinctive—he had a hunchback, unnaturally short legs, and a head disproportionately large for his body—he experienced an adolescent vision quest that confirmed his peculiar nature: in it he was granted the powers to become a shaman. After his vision, he changed his name to Smohalla ("Dreamer"), a reference to the means by which spirits communicated with him.

Smohalla's reputation grew quickly. Like all successful Plateau shamans, Smohalla could accurately predict the arrival of the annual salmon runs, foretell where root diggers would find fertile grounds, and direct hunters to game herds; but he also had a reputation for being able to predict earthquakes and eclipses. Skeptical whites claimed that Smohalla got this information from an almanac, but the shaman claimed that spirits told him of these things because he was faithful to the traditional religion of his people.

Smohalla's continuing commitment to native traditions brought him into conflict with progressive elements in his village. In about 1850 he debated with a Wallawalla political leader named Homily over accepting white requests to use tribal land. "You do not own this land, our Mother Earth," he told Homily. "It is not your land to barter to the white people like a piece of salmon." But Homily chided, "Look at you, you are a poor man. Where are all your horses? You are no fit leader for your people. . . . You always talk of the old customs while up and down the river others accept the new ways and they grow rich." Homily's speech won the village over, and Smohalla and a small group of followers were forced to flee. They moved to the foot of the Priest Rapids near the present-day town of Vernita, Washington. There they were free to live as the shaman taught them, but their independence was short-lived.

Taking advantage of factional tensions between groups, Washington Territory officials convinced the largest and most powerful local Indian groups to settle on large reservations in 1855, ceding thousands of square miles of land belonging to outlying groups. Although the land occupied by his village had been sold out from under him, Smohalla refused to relocate onto the new reserve. He also refused to join an alliance that warred against the treaties, putting him at odds with all the contending parties in Plateau diplomacy. Growing resentment over Smohalla's position finally led to a confrontation between the shaman and a Sinkiuse political leader named Moses. Some witnesses claimed that the two men fought and that Smohalla died of his wounds. According to another story, at about this same time Smohalla's favorite daughter died of European diseases and the shaman died of grief at her graveside.

Accounts of Smohalla's death were particularly important to the role he would play in Plateau life. Tradition among Plateau peoples called for prophets to experience death and then return to life bearing important messages for the living. Smohalla always claimed that this was how he had learned his religious ideology, the Washani (dancer's) Creed.

The fundamental message in the Washani Creed was that of the organic unity between people and the earth. Smohalla often repeated the basic articles of faith:

You ask me to plough the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? Then when I die she will not take me to her bosom to rest.

You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? Then when I die I cannot enter her body to be born again.

You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it, and be rich like white men, but how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

Smohalla also taught his followers that they should not work as white people did, but should accept the fish, game, and bulbs that were nature's gifts. "Men who work cannot dream," he said, "and wisdom comes to us in dreams." Finally, he taught that "those who cut up the lands or sign papers for the lands will be defrauded of their rights, and will be punished by God's anger."

In essence, Smohalla was advocating passive resistance to the forces of modernization and cultural disintegration. Rather than resorting to armed rebellion, Smohalla counseled his followers to withdraw into the world of dreams to await supernatural events that would bring relief and salvation. "After a while," Smohalla proclaimed, "when God is ready, he will drive away all the people except the people who have obeyed the laws." Then those who obeyed the Washani Creed would experience new life. "All the dead men will come to life again," Smohalla asserted. "Their spirits will come to their bodies again."

Smohalla's message had great appeal for Plateau groups who, like the prophet's own band, had been excluded from treaty settlements in 1855. The most prominent of these, the Wallowa band of the Nez Perces, led by young Chief Joseph, never joined the Washani faith, but often referred to Smohalla's creed as a reflection of the truth. Such references led white policymakers to conclude that Smohalla was a latter-day Tenskwatawa—the Shawnee Prophet—and Joseph a reborn Tecumseh, a perception that led to the Nez Perce War in 1877.

Smohalla weathered the violence of the 1870s virtually unscathed. Although continuing pressure by Indian agents and military men carved the plateau region into a checkerboard of reservations and homesteads, hundreds refused to "sign papers for the land." They continued to move about the plateau harvesting the gifts of nature, protected by provisions in the 1855 treaties that granted them the right to gather foods in their "usual and accustomed places." Various government agents tried to enlist Smohalla in the allotment process, but he apparently refused to cooperate. As he aged and grew increasingly blind, the prophet withdrew from public life.

Smohalla died in 1895, but the Washani ideology lived on. Outside the plateau, Indian groups who heard about Smohalla's religion incorporated aspects of the Washani Creed into resistance ideologies like the Ghost Dance. In the Pacific Northwest, both whites and Indians found meaning in Smohalla's teachings, but an essential irony resulted. In the 1960s, white conservationists found a powerful rhetoric in the Washani Creed and used it to lobby for laws designed to control hunting, fishing, and other such practices. At the same time, both reservation and nonreservation Indians cited the prophet's creed as a justification for disregarding those very conservation measures on the grounds that they violated not only treaty rights, but the prophet's religious laws as well.

See also Joseph; Plateau Tribes.

Christopher L. Miller, Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985); Click Relander, Drummers and Dreamers: The Story of Smowhala the Prophet and His Nephew Puck Hyah Toot, the Last Prophet of the Nearly Extinct River People, the Last Wanapums (1953; reprint, Seattle: Pacific Northwest National Parks and Forest Association, 1986); Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown, Dreamer-Prophets of the Columbia Plateau: Smohalla and Skolaskin (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989).
Christopher L. Miller
University of Texas, Pan American

http://www.college.cengage.com/history/r...ohalla.htm